The next few weeks are busy ones for the DevOps conference circuit. In just a week, DevOps.com will kick off another one of its intimate Camp DevOps gatherings in Houston, with talks lined up on everything from the evolution of DevOps to mythbusting DevOps fallacies. Meanwhile, another worthy show kicks off from San Francisco today: DevOps Enterprise. A product of collaboration between IT Revolution’s Gene Kim and Electric Cloud’s Steve Brodie, this week’s confab sold out with 500-attendees, and its own program is jammed with a slate of speakers passionate about agile development, continuous delivery and DevOps. DevOps.com caught up with Kim and Brodie before the show to learn a little bit about what’s on tap. According to the pair, there are four key trends and themes that seem to weave themselves throughout the conference’s programming:
1. DevOps Is About Normal Organizations Doing Heroic Things
According to Kim, the stories being told by the program speakers are as “heroic and amazing” as anything you’d hear from the outlier “unicorn” companies like Google, Amazon, Etsy who are setting the pace for the DevOps movement.
“And they are not only replicating the results you’d typically see from these unicorn Internet companies, they’re doing it inside organizations that have perhaps decades of low-trust, command-and-control bureaucracy,” he says.
2. Chief Architects Are The Newest Actors in the DevOps Cast Of Characters
Not only will the storytellers include ops leadership, dev leadership and executive leadership, there’ll also be a strong contingent of chief architects stepping in to discuss continuous delivery.
“Architects are often the first people to see the problem because they see the end-to-end BLANK stream,” Kim says, “and architects are in a very powerful place to affect change that spans dev, test and operations.”
3. DevOps Spans Across More Industries Than You’d Think
While there will be speakers from the type of usual suspect companies one would expect to be practicing DevOps—Web, IT, software and so-on—the range of types of companies represented by the speakers shows the surprising reach of the movement across industries, Brodie says.
“DevOps is relevant across sectors,” Brodie says. “We have presentation from companies you’d expect, but also, for instance, government, and organizations doing embedded systems development. Sometimes people think of DevOps as big data center-centric, but it is relevant with the Internet of Things and in this mobile world.”
4.Security Is Possible Through DevOps
“The number one objection that comes up over and over again in terms of why we can’t do DevOps is information security and compliance,” Kim says. But more than one speaker will explain why infosec is not only possible with DevOps, but actually stands to benefit. And that includes not only risk management, but compliance in highly regulated industries as well. “We have a whole panel on security and compliance, including James DeLuccia from Ernst & Young, describing how publicly traded, heavily regulated organizations are putting DevOps systems into place and still maintain compliance.”
Even though the conference is sold out, the entire DevOps community can benefit from the programming. The show is offering a live stream starting at 9 A.M. PT for those interested in viewing talks remotely.And if you’re still craving the benefits of networking in a conference hallway track, there’s still time to sign up for Camp DevOps Houston. Registration is still open and it is just $5.
